Academia

Category archives for Academia

A run-down of good recent stuff, highly recommended for your weekend reading and bookmarking: PLoS One: Interview with Peter Binfield: …In my view PLoS ONE is the most dynamic, innovative and exciting journal in the world, and I am proud to work on it. In many ways PLoS ONE operates like any other journal however…

Scientific facts are fun. But probably to a limited number of people. It’s more fun to know how scientists got those facts – their thoughts, motivations and methods. How they did it. Why they did it. Where did they get the idea to do it in the first place. It’s even more fun, for a…

As the boundaries between formal and informal scientific communication is blurring – think of pre-print sites, Open Notebook Science and blogs, for starters – the issue of what is citable and how it should be cited is becoming more and more prominent. There is a very interesting discussion on this topic in the comments section…

The UCLA Pro-Test is tomorrow. If you live there – go. If not, prepare yourself for inevitable discussions – online and offline – by getting informed. And my fellow science bloggers have certainly provided plenty of food for thought on the issue of use of animals in research. First, you have to read Janet Stemwedel’s…

I know it’s been a couple of months now since the ScienceOnline’09 and I have reviewed only a couple of sessions I myself attended and did not do the others. I don’t know if I will ever make it to reviewing them one by one, but other people’s reviews on them are under the fold…

About a week ago, my brother sent me a couple of interesting papers about funding in science, one in Canada, the other in the UK. I barely had time to skim the abstracts at the time, but thought I would put it up for discussion online and come back to it later. So I posted…

This is very interesting, referring to Canadian system: Cost of the NSERC Science Grant Peer Review System Exceeds the Cost of Giving Every Qualified Researcher a Baseline Grant: Using Natural Science and Engineering Research Council Canada (NSERC) statistics, we show that the $40,000 (Canadian) cost of preparation for a grant application and rejection by peer…

Daniel Lemire asks this question when observing a fallacy voiced in an editorial: …..only a small fraction of the top 100 papers ranked by the number of citations (17 of 100) were published by single authors…..a published paper resulting from collaborative work has a higher chance of attracting more citations. You can discuss the fallacy…

The unmovable movers! Or so says Bill Hooker: For instance: I use Open Office in preference to Word because I’m willing to put up with a short learning curve and a few inconveniences, having (as they say here in the US) drunk the Open Kool-Aid. But I’m something of an exception. Faced with a single…